Iran and the P5+1 nations have drawn up a draft proposal for the lifting of sanctions in the event that Tehran complies with a comprehensive nuclear agreement, the Associated Press (AP) reported Saturday.

Written by technical experts, the document still must be approved by senior officials of the seven nations at the table, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the foreign ministers of the five other countries expected to join Kerry and Zarif in Vienna this weekend for a push to meet a July 7 deadline. …

The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on this past week’s confidential negotiations, said the sanctions annex was completed this week by experts from Iran and the six world powers in the negotiations: the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia. They did not provide details of the agreement.

According to the AP, the annex governing sanctions relief is not yet complete, nor is there an agreement on how to “snap-back” sanctions in case of Iranian violations.

And to keep pressure on Iran, world powers had been hoping to finalize a system for snapping suspended sanctions back into force if Iran cheats on the accord. Russia has traditionally opposed any plan that would see them lose their U.N. veto power and a senior Russian negotiator said only this week that his government rejected any automatic “snapback” of sanctions.

President Barack Obama has cited sanctions snap-back as the guarantee that Iran will abide by the emerging nuclear deal, but an AP analysis in April concluded that the plan for reimposing sanctions once lifted “remains poorly defined and may prove unworkable.”

In The Central Pillar Supporting the Iran Deal Has a Big Crack In It, which was published in the July 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Emanuele Ottolenghi explained what makes the plan to “snap-back” sanctions unworkable.

There are good reasons for Iran, the Europeans, and the global business community to doubt the viability of the snap-back mechanism. After all, it took years of patient and tenacious U.S. diplomacy to prod a reluctant international community into agreeing and then enacting the complicated sanctions regime in place since March 2007, when the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 1737. In particular, getting the United Nations Security Council’s stamp of approval for non-proliferation sanctions proved extremely difficult. Though this approach eventually bore fruit—six binding resolutions under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter were approved between July 2006 and June 2010—it also showed its limits.

Ottolenghi notes that, once sanctions were partially lifted, Iranian companies experienced a “surge in interest” from the West, with the administration doing little to fight it.

Nobody can fault the Obama administration’s public diplomacy efforts. Washington assiduously messaged that Tehran was not open for business. As with so many other aspects of the administration’s foreign policy, however, the problem was that even an effective PR campaign is no substitute for policy itself. As a result, twenty months of sanctions relief, coupled with the anticipation of the sanctions’ ultimate demise, resulted in a resumption of trade, a modest economic recovery, and a surge in interest among Western companies keen to invest in Iran’s economy once sanctions are lifted.

Exhibit one is the Iranian economy itself, which grew by three percent over the past fiscal year. According to my colleague Saeed Ghasseminejad, all sectors experienced growth, but the automotive and petrochemical sectors—which benefited from sanctions relief—did not merely recover, they boomed. Car sales registered a staggering 71 percent increase, while petrochemical sales grew 18 percent. Given that the bulk of Iran’s car sales are for the domestic market, such growth reflects an element that transcends mere numbers. It shows growth in consumer confidence, which is in and of itself a sign of a newfound economic optimism among the Iranian middle class. There is more to be optimistic about regarding Iran’s economy: as my colleague reported, inflation was halved, while oil production and sales went up. Considering the prominent role played by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in these sectors of the economy, it is surprising that Washington agreed to suspend sanctions before knowing the full measure of Iran’s concessions. After all, the IRGC is the custodian of Tehran’s nuclear secrets.

The Obama administration may be quick to respond that the IRGC is still under sanctions and may never be “un-sanctioned,” which brings us to exhibit two: Since November 2013, there has not been a single designation against an IRGC-controlled commercial entity. This is not for lack of available intelligence. Evidence from Iranian corporate filings is easily accessible through the internet and corporate ownership of publicly traded companies is in the public domain. The evidence shows that the IRGC, alongside other branches of Iran’s armed forces, controls over 20 percent of the Tehran Stock Exchange. Yet the Obama administration has largely refrained from going after these assets.

One of the more prominent examples that Ottolenghi mentioned is the case of Mahan Air, a sanctioned Iranian airline, which purchased eight Airbus jets in violation of sanctions. Though the United States was informed of this purchase, it did nothing to stop it. With America’s demonstrated disinterest in enforcing existing sanctions, Ottolenghi concludes:

Ultimately, it matters less whether everyone wants to trade with the Ayatollahs than whether they believe Washington’s threats.

It is not that the Ayatollahs do not take U.S. sanctions seriously. They took them seriously enough to engage in genuine negotiations for the first time in years. It’s that, in general, they look at America and no longer see a threat. Their hatred of America was once balanced with a healthy dose of awe and respect for the pain it was both capable of and willing to inflict on its enemies. But in 2015, Tehran knows that a president who said “Assad must go” in 2011 can no longer be believed. The ayatollahs look at the president who threatened a military response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then blinked. What they see are empty threats.

So does the region. So do allies and enemies. They will treat the U.S. threat of snap-back sanctions with the same utter contempt.

[Photo: wochit World / YouTube ]